A benevolent dictator, who knows all and controls all, and yet somehow knows nothing and controls nothing. When I was younger, it was comforting perhaps, and even now in adulthood, it is a resort I still cling to when I am terrified or adrift. But I don't truly believe in him, not that way, not really.

I have eaten perhaps one too many of the fruit that have fallen from this fenced off tree, and now I see. Too much? Enough to doubt, enough to know I am completely and utterly naked.

And I'm fine with that.

And that's a lie.

But the idea of spirit exists, in part because i desperately want it to be real, and in part because of humanity. Because of beauty, and art, and yes, even evil, this endless river that flows through history and individuals the same. At different speeds and different levels of consciousness, but there. In the unknowable reaches of our universe, down to the breath I take even now, there is a current, a 'something' there.

The breath of god? I don't claim to know or name it. But i feel it, or I want to, and so I do. Its manifestation is so different in each of us, in that whoever or whatever we call god is shifted as through a prism, through our ideas and experience and somehow becomes personal and real. This invisible idea, bent through a glass, exploding into a shifting exuberance of color onto the walls of our lives.

Is this 'belief'? I don't know. Certainly not in the way it once was, but I no longer find fear in the uncertainty. The doubt is my comfort, the ability to voice something as completely unknowable AND ACCEPT IT as such is strangely comforting.

I dislike the word 'agnostic' as it connotes an arrogance in its denial of truth, somehow that to KNOW you can never know makes one superior. I am something like a spiritual agnostic, not an intellectual one. I don't believe that spirit and faith can be intellectualized, and the study of theology bores me, an endless debate over things that have little or merely invented cosmic meaning, listings of things we must get right or wrong to be embraced at the end by some being who holds us all. This I cannot subscribe to.

I don't know god, but I know spirit, if to feel is to know.

I feel god in the swelling music of a great film, or even a bad film. In tears shed over the pages of a novel, or the delight of my infant son smiling at me in pure joy, my wife curling into my back asleep in the night.

I feel god when I look up at a waterfall, or stand under one. The beauty of this world, this universe entire, in all its terrifying vast darkness makes me believe that we are not alone, that the spirit knows we are here and knows who we are.

But what if this spirit IS us, the same force that made us crawl from the mud, walking, changing, learning, and adapting over millennia until we are as we are now? It is here and we have consumed it, created it, a rushing river flowing out of us? Can we be only vessels or can we be the source?

There are things in us that separate, that cause the river to cease, the spirit to dry up and disappear. Through tributaries this water tries always to flow, and we are the means to stifle its course or let it wash us away.

Our lives are not our own. Our breadth of feeling correlates directly to our level of connection. This is the breath of god connecting, breathed into the first of us and disappeared.

The Architect of humanity. His last breath was perhaps the one that gave us life.

In essence maybe we are the evolution of god, in that we are infused with his figurative breath?

As god breathed into us and we awoke so then did he pass away and WE now are gods breath in the universe, capable of life or death and culpable of the same. It is OUR words that direct the flow, the breath, our lives. WE are the word and breath now in this place, gods every one.

Sometimes I wish that I could bejust as pretty as...And fly about the heavensraining happy tears of joyAnd then I wear the silken dresssoft as the eyelashes of unicornsand play between the cloud siteswhistling all the wayand wishing you were hereshirtless and sweatydigging me a hole(?)and then talking about numbersbecause you know how when you talk about numbersit really turns me on.And then you will dig more holes andGet so tired and even more sweatyThat bugs will stick to you and you willSmell worse than I thought.Then I will place you gently in a wheelbarrow.

II

I pulled a dozen from you Faceless little Beasts They shouted, give us back our cheeseBut I kept their cheese Like I kept your girlfriend.

Resurrecting the dead is as easy As digging them outBrushing dust from open mouths Tying strings to armsParade them like puppets They always wanted to live forever Really what's changed.

V

I am the pharaohSandstone and sunlight For the viewing pleasureof the massesin this life and the next.I am in red, and obese. Dangerously obese and alone. The sad pharaoh. Sand and light.

VI

Blow me down you could like a flower when you appear like that, 2FNudeRed and sweaty,Impossible to get a word in edgewiseI hope you realize in this public corridor asyou scream and screambloodshot and nested hairthat the children from apartment 2D watch with no longer wide eyesbecause you do this so oftenthis nudity and screamingI sometimes think you have it in for methat one day i wont wake at allyou will see to thatPlease missgo back inside put on a robe

VII

in wondering where you went So angry scattered beads across the kitchen floor Children huddled hiding in the playhouse across the yard Uncertain Crying This unsettling screaming does no one good least of all you And the children crying terrifiedBut big sister scooped them up and shepherded them out Even through her terror still she was the adult As we screamed and shouted Throwing smashing And then I go to 'rescue' them from us And with breaking heart I still treat them in anger stillBecause I'm still angry at you and me for thisThey did nothing to deserve being this fearfulAnd we did nothing to justify this behaviour Everyone is bad parents

VIII

Build it, lego Blocks like water. Tear it down In buckets all the pieces Scattered ScatterPieces

IX

The off brand theatre KnockoffTalk to c list stars Who cares Your interviewing skills are tepid at bestThe films the same thoughThe warnings to turn off cell phones are laughableThey have no money or imagination Except that they haven't sold out So that's somethingAnd the film is the same So it's more about brand loyalty and class for us I want it to be on brand because of polish But it's more money I want the polish And I pay it almost gladly Give me the polishMore polish Until it gleams

Take my money.

X

They run the boardwalks Past raging chasm Up then down again For innumerable lifeless images scattered once then lost.

Forgotten keepsakes Trading so quickly eternity For air conditioned car

XIThe path once straight became a darkened maze Slowly though so when finally I raised tired eyes found only darkness in its stead I wail and beat these bloodied hands on unyielding branches stone.